I went backpacking last weekend and found a new mining adit in a valley I frequent. The entrance was huge and monolithic and appeared to be very stable, but I didn’t go inside. I was alone, far away from people and trails, and I value my life. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t occur to me. See, over the past month I’ve been watching mine exploration videos on YouTube, but those have all been mines in Nevada. The guy who runs the channel makes it look easy, but that’s because he used to be a miner: he knows the geology, the terms, where to expect different features, how to get out. It’s too tempting to watch those, think that it must be easy, and then go and do something stupid. For me, I was pretty happy just to find this one. I even found the old path the miners took up to the adit! Sadly, all traces otherwise had been completely removed.
I have to say that watching those videos has taught me more about mines than any book ever has. Which is shameful to books. They really are a constrained format, great for some things and lousy for others. They do a great job providing information, but they don’t provide experience. Fiction is a little different. Fiction actually takes advantage of the lack of experience and hijacks your brain’s imagination with description and narrative to produce a similar effect. Nonetheless, it comes nowhere close to watching a time lapse of a cargo ship traveling to ports across the world, so written media struggles to communicate reality.
I was wondering why I am so drawn to books and can’t seem to get away from them. Then I remembered taking the Strengths Quest test my freshman year of college. It’s like a personality test, but it checks for strengths out of like 25 or 30 options. After taking the test, you get your top five strengths back. My top two? Intellection and Strategic. [don’t ask me why they mixed adjectives with nouns, frick…] I don’t know how I forgot about this, but suddenly many things in my life made a little more sense. Thinking is brain food. I need it. Just like strategizing. Now, I suck at strategizing at like, board games, even video games sometimes. I played through Final Fantasy 12 without using some of the most powerful magic spells because I was too lazy to figure out how to use them! But that’s because I only enjoy strategizing about things that matter to me, and life and work is one of those things, and hey! – guess why I’m still writing this blog three years later?
So it makes more sense why I’m so drawn to books. After all, videos excel at conveying experience, but they don’t often do a great job at generating thought. Some do succeed, like the Fall of Civilizations podcast (the Songhai empire video was really amazing), but the medium simply isn’t designed to generate thought. It’s there to tell you, in precise ways, what is and isn’t. And books are better at leaving that open.
But the problem is that the quality of most books is extremely lacking. As I’ve mentioned, most of these books are written at the sixth-grade reading level, because that’s the level at which most people read. Whenever I read Adam Smith, or Thomas Malthus, or Henry Thoreau, I’m always like, “Holy shit, these guys knew how to write!” It’s just miles above what you see in book stores today. But these guys lived at a time when writing flourished and had high expectations. And I don’t think that was necessarily “ideal”. My writing is not great, but I sure enjoy it, and it’s cool to have near-instant accessibility to the world on this blog. Writing is fun, and I especially enjoy when I can work a bit of wit and bite into my posts. I wouldn’t trade this for floofy high-brow language any day, thought I can still appreciate how masterful of writers people used to be. But books today are significantly dumbed down. Nonfiction follows an extremely predictable pattern, but people are also incentivized to say things that sell books and not things that make people think hard. People, by and large, do not want to think hard. And I get that. There are plenty of subjects I don’t want to think very hard about, either! But of the things that matter to me, it just feels that so little has been said.
So the conundrum is that while I want brain food, most of the brain food out there is garbage.
Blogs help fill this role. Some of the best thinking I have ever read has been on blogs. Short, individual posts prevent the necessity of a predictable table of contents. People can let lose with ease, they can lift up certain ideas and push others down. And while the sheer number of blogs can be overwhelming, it’s easy enough to find a few that really strike your fancy, to find some rare gems of thinking and inspiration. And that, honestly, I think is where things have moved. People are realizing just how lame some of these non-fiction books have become. It’s just been time for a new format that returns more for less of an investment.
And books still stuck.
I recently came across praise for a book called “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less”. It’s a unique flavor of minimalism and sounded really interesting! But I know how it goes. You pay $15 for one of these popular paperbacks, you read it, you glean a few things, then it rots on the shelf. And at least in my life, these are always the books I get rid of in short order. I checked the library website: every copy was checked out, and several were on hold. No go there. So, knowing how most authors, when giving presentations, basically say exactly what is in their books [amazing, huh? Why do these authors never have anything more to say except what is already in their books?], I decided to search YouTube [!] for talks by this guy, and watched a few to get the gist. It was…kind of interesting, kind of not. And there seemed to be this idea that focusing on the essentials and avoiding distractions leads to greater productivity. And I think one of the talks was actually to a business. I did some more research and found that really this was just a mouthpiece for productivity. And, I mean, that’s how you make money. You write a fancy book about boosting productivity, America gets horny, then you get these CEOs of big companies to pay you thousands of dollars to pep-talk their employees into greater productivity, while also increasing your book sales. You make out like a bandit. All for 150-200 pages of bullshit, as long as you’re good at selling it and it has just enough useful points for schmucks like me to read it and believe it’s about living a simpler life. “Oh, that was pretty good!”
Yup, same shit, ‘nother day. Oh, and maybe it does have some good points. But I’ll wait a few years until I can actually check it out, because I’m not paying for that crap.
And this is the hard part, that may make me sound arrogant. But why do I even need a book to tell me how to live a more essential life? I’ve been getting rid of things for the past decade, mulling over possessions, what’s useful to keep, what’s not. Some people get rid of things much faster than I do, and some are much better at not having stuff in the first place. But it’s been a huge contemplative journey for me for a very long time, and these past few months have really gone into overdrive. You just have to ask yourself, “Is this really what I need in my life?” I don’t mean to be arrogant in the face of all the ideas in the world, but you really have to ask yourself how much you can expect to get out of something. Reading books on minimalism is unlikely to actually help me at this point. I still crave ideas and thoughts. I still desire learning and growing, but on this subject, I’m just not sure what I’m hoping to gain. And I think this is a common problem, actually for a lot of people.
It’s like books on financial independence. They all basically say the same thing. The decreasing returns on reading them are enormous. When you’ve been reading the blogs for years, there isn’t much to gain from one book, and there’s even less to gain from reading five, because they are less and less likely to tell you something new and useful.
I did find some fresh thoughts on escaping the 9-5, and the content is considerably deeper than what I often see, so I was excited to order that book the other day.
Books still suck, though. Almost all of them over-promise and under-deliver.